Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We really do hear some nonsense in some of these debates and caricatures from those opposite. I speak to workers all the time. I speak to workers about their employment. I speak in particular to workers who work in small businesses in my home state of Western Australia. And guess what? They don't talk about the union movement. They want a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Yes, they do want that. They want a good relationship with their boss. They don't want the union movement sticking their noses into the small and medium-sized business places of Western Australia. They don't want that, and anyone who thinks they do is, quite frankly, merely in here to do the bidding of the union movement—because that is the central lie at the heart of this legislation.

The central lie at the heart of this legislation is that there has been a massive change in the make-up of the Australian workforce over the past couple of generations. The balance between part-time, casual, full-time and gig work, for want of a better phrase, in the Australian economy has not changed in over a generation. This growth of gig work that those opposite talk about is a lie. This growth of casualisation in the economy that those opposite talk about is a lie. It simply hasn't happened. The broad make-up of the Australian economy has not changed in terms of those broad employment categories since the 1990s, and yet you have those opposite continuing to stand up in here and roll this out as a reason why they have to make these radical changes.

The real reason they have to make these radical changes is they have to follow their paymasters. They have to do what the union movement tells them to do. That is at the core of the previous bill we passed last year. It is at the core of this bill. It is the Labor Party doing what their union bosses sent them here to do and giving the union movement a business model into the future. Because guess what? Workers voted with their feet. Workers voted with their feet about the union movement. What's the current percentage of the private sector workforce that's joined a union? I know Senator O'Sullivan knows because we sat through the inquiry into this bill. I know Senator O'Sullivan knows. I suspect other senators on this side know. I think Senator Lambie would know as well. It's under 10 per cent. It's eight per cent. Less than one in 10 private sector workers feels the union movement delivers good value to them—less than one in 10 private sector workers. So this idea that workers, particularly workers in small and medium business, are clamouring to get the union movement back through their door to cause problems in their workplace—because the union movement don't like casualised workers, do they? They don't like flexibility. That's the other lie that's at the heart of this bill—the idea that casual or flexible workplaces and workforces are a bad thing. Many, many workers choose casual, non-permanent, part-time, gig work at various points in their career for very good personal and economic reasons. People sometimes choose to work flexible hours or casual hours because of home commitments. Perhaps they choose to work in those jobs because they're studying at university and don't want the commitment of a full-time or permanent part-time position.

At the hearings that Senator O'Sullivan and I participated in—Senator O'Sullivan did an outstanding job as the deputy chair of the committee—people in the union movement were willing to say that casualisation isn't really a major problem and that people do choose to be casuals in the workforce. So why does the union movement hate casualisation and flexibility so much? The reason is quite simple. Because those sectors of the workforce are harder to unionise. It's harder to get people to sign up to unions. It's harder to get those union dues. It's harder to get those new members of the Labor Party via the union movement.

We've very clearly got here, pretty much in black and white, a business model for the union movement. But what this bill fails to do is almost as egregious as what it does do. On the one hand it provides a business model to the union movement; it provides a business model to that small and shrinking part of the economy, as we have seen over the past few generations. Private-sector workers, in particular, have been departing the unions. They don't see the need for them. They don't want them in their workplaces—unless they're forced in by the government, given rights of access under this legislation into businesses that they didn't have a right of access to before.

On the other hand, what doesn't this bill do? This bill actually does nothing good, and it does a number of things that will be destructive to our economy over time. It does absolutely nothing for productivity in Australia. We will see a continuing decline and weakness in productivity in this country on the back of this bill. The reality is that those negative impacts on the economy do take time to flow through. But where you'll see it first is in the unemployment rate. We saw the Governor of the Reserve Bank, in her public statements following the Reserve Bank's decision, saying that they expect the unemployment rate to rise. Of course, inefficiency in the workplace and inefficiency in our industrial relations system will have the consequence of putting people out of work, of putting less people into work. There will be less jobs available to younger people to get into permanent employment, if that is what they choose.

It will create uncertainty in the business community, uncertainty that we have seen and we have heard about. I know those opposite don't talk to businesses, but we do. And what we hear from those businesses is that this bill puts uncertainty about future employment opportunities into their minds. It makes them hesitant about how to treat their current employees. It makes them uncertain about the legislative environment they have to operate in, about the red tape they have to operate under. You've got to remember a lot of the businesses I'm talking about are not your Woolies and Coles and Qantas, with massive human resource departments. Mum or dad is the human resource department. Mum or dad is the one who has to comply with the red tape. When I grew up—I grew up on a family farm, as many of you know—it was mum and dad. That was it. And that is true of so many small businesses across Australia. They're not the ones who have the massive human resource department behind them to navigate this right to disconnect, which is something we didn't even hear about until the last few days in the media. It's something that certainly wasn't a part of the inquiry Senator O'Sullivan and I participated in on the Education and Employment Legislation Committee. Maybe Senator Sheldon, the chair of that committee, knew about the right-to-disconnect provisions. Maybe he knows what that drafting is now. But I haven't seen it yet. How can we make a sensible judgement on legislation when parts of it, as Senator Thorpe's contribution indicated earlier, include amendments for which this is the first I've heard about them? It's the first I, as a member of the committee inquiring into this bill, have heard about amendments that Senator Thorpe has negotiated with the government. We've also got the Greens' amendment that they've negotiated with the government and that we haven't seen.

The right to disconnect is an issue that has literally not been raised with me once in the last six years of talking to businesses and employees. Not once has a worker said to me, 'By the way, I really don't want to have to take a call from my boss at 5.30 in the afternoon.' It's absolute nonsense. It's a problem searching for a solution where the problem didn't exist in the first place. It's just a non-issue. Labor rolls over to the Greens yet again—the tail wagging the dog—on an issue they know is not an issue. But doing the bidding of their union movement and getting this bill through are all that matters to them, so it's, 'Let's just give that to the Greens so we can get this bill through parliament and do what the union movement has told us to do.'

Businesses are awake to this, and I think a lot of employees are awake to this. Employees want to maintain a positive relationship with the businesses that employ them, and they don't want the reimposition of union right of entry. They don't want the unions to get involved at their workplaces, and they have voted with their feet. The private sector workers of Australia voted with their feet. They left the union movement in droves over the last couple of decades, to deal directly with the businesses that employ them, and that is a system saw Australia have the longest stretch of economic growth in our history during that period. What was the key ingredient in the IR mix? It was flexibility and that ability for people to pick and choose within a system the kind of environment and the kind of workplace relationship that they wanted to have with their employer. They didn't want the union movement involved at every workplace or the heavy-handedness of the centralised industrial relations system that we are seeing this bill return Australia to.

This is an economically destructive bill. It will damage our economy over time and it will see more people on the unemployment queue. I think that is a disgrace, and this bill should not be supported.